Publication date:
05 April 2012Length of book:
216 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442209176
Last Season of Innocence discusses the lives of the preteens and teenagers who were in junior high school, high school, and the first year of college in the 1960s. These are the young people who read Seventeen and Mad, watched more television than their older siblings, and tended to listen to 45 rpm singles or "mono" LPs rather than the more sophisticated stereo albums of their older siblings. Substantial numbers of these teens could and did join political protests, but they also engaged in a more personal daily struggle with school dress codes and parental intrusion on social life. In a nation where a third of the population was under nineteen, they were hardly invisible, but their experience seems to have been marginalized by the twenty-somethings who largely redefined the meaning of the youth culture and took center stage in doing so. Brooks offers a unique account of the much-chronicled 1960s by examining the experiences of these preteens and teenagers.
Brooks (history, Villanova Univ.; Boomers: The Cold War Generation Grows Up) here reviews the academic, social, and cultural experiences of American preteens and teenagers from 1960 to 1969. He organizes his book both chronologically and thematically to provide a narrative of the changes in teenage culture over the course of the decade. He ably compares the generally accepted historical narrative that focuses on political protest and psychedelic music with data such as music sales and radio charts, popular magazine features, and television ratings to show that, in fact, the experience of teenagers varied wildly throughout these years. A particular strength of the work is the author’s focus on the early 1960s, as this period has had far less scholarly attention than the end of the decade. VERDICT There is a general note on sources, but no direct citations via endnotes, which may disappoint serious readers. However, while numerous other works have examined the cultural history of the 1960s, Brooks’s book is one of the few to focus solely on the American teenager. As such, highly recommended for followers of modern American cultural history.